cf.Objective() 2008: From Procedural to OO - Dan Wilson

One of the keywords here is "pragmatism". I know from personal, continuing experience that it can be a daunting proposition to move an application from procedural to OO.

Things you would want to consider when refactoring are in-house skill-sets, and problem spots in your application. If you have a bunch of people that are very procedural programmers, you may be wasting your time with a re-factor. You're team still has to be able to work on the code right? But, if people in your shop have some OO experience or are game to learn, then it's a good idea. Once you get started you want to ask yourself, "Where are our problem spots?". You already need to work on those spots anyway, so it's an efficient choice to start there in your OO refactor.

Always use version control! Even if you work alone! Seriously, however long it takes you to set up your version control repo of choice, it will be time well spent. You will need that version history while re-factoring.

Dan, talked some on patterns. There was a liberal sprinkling of pragmatism when talking about patterns too. Use them where they actually solve a problem and to the extent that you need them. Don't slavishly apply a pattern verbatim! I won't go into detail on the patterns. However, I'd like to mention, the first one (MVC) doesn't even require OO. However, it would be a good first step to get you closer to OO. Once you have separated the code that deals with the data (Model) from the code that displays stuff to the user (View) and the code that wires those together (Controller), then you're ready to see what can be put in Objects.

This was a talk with a lot of practical code examples. So, I think it may lose a bit in the translation.

Update: Dan was kind enough to send me a link to the presentation material. Get it here.